Dustin Lance Black Quotes

That's precisely what we do as actors: try to convince the audience we are somebody else. And if you can do that, you are really doing something.

I adore actors/actresses that have range: someone that can transform into a character that is far beyond who they truly are. Charlize Theron and Johnny Depp are amazing at this.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

It's true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character. And I feel it's a limit. I'm always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

I love playing the vamp, and I get sent out for a lot of that stuff, maybe because I do it well.

The art of acting is to be other than what you are.

People are confusing me with a good actor when I'm just a good mimic. When someone asks me to play a nun from the fifteenth century, you'll see what I mean.

Any good actor is a character actor.

My dream role would be someone anything that Meryl Streep can do. 'Julia and Julia' - I thought that was beautiful. She just had the essence of her. To truly become someone, invoking emotions like happiness and sadness and everything in between, that's what I want to be able to do.

I love performing and pretending - it's very easy for me.

I find it quite easy to get in and out of character. I don't know why - I guess it's my job.

There are actors who are really fantastically talented at being natural on screen and appearing to be themselves, but I like the challenge of becoming somebody else.

When I talk about character work, I don't really feel like i do much as an actor when I look at other great actors who win big awards for doing incredible transformations.

If Brando can do Capote and I can do Brando - well then, I can do Capote.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

When you watch me on the screen, you should not be able to recognise me. If people say, you're a natural and an organic actor, that's an insult. If you're being yourself all the time on screen, that means you don't know how to act.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

I used to think the actor's job was immersing himself completely in another personality.

For me, portraying a character is not about liking or disliking it; it's about meeting a challenge that's thrown at you.

I played a father a few times. You don't have to shoot heroin to play a heroin addict ... I'm not running for president but I could play a candidate. Most of the time, you don't really have to have those things in your life to understand what they're like.

I sing as an actress. Whatever I'm singing about, I just become the story.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.